“We are honored to have this accomplished group dedicate the time and care it takes to view and discuss the films in competition this year,” said Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the Festival, in a statement.

The juries will award $175,000 in the six categories of World Narrative, World Documentary, Best New Narrative Director, Best New Documentary Director, Narrative Short Film Competition, and Documentary and Student Short Film Competition.

TFF also announced the judges for their Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Awards, which include Rosario Dawson, Cuba Gooding Jr., Gabourey Sidibe, and Mekhi Phifer.

In honor of Earth Day, Kiehl’s is pleased to announce a Limited Edition Label Art series with Rosario Dawson, in which 100% of the net profits will benefit  Recycle Across America (RAA), a nonprofit that works to make recycling easier for the masses. In fact, 100 percent of the profits (up to $100,000) from the sale of its limited-edition Rare Earth Deep Pore Cleansing Masques ($23) will go to RAA so that select schools throughout the US can strengthen their recycling programs.

Kiehls Rare Earth masque helps purify and detoxify skin while minimizing the appearance of enlarged pores. It is formulated with Amazonian white clay to gently draw out oil, dirt and toxins that can clog pores as well as oatmeal and aloe vera to help soothe, hydrate and protect sensitive skin.

Purchase Rosario Dawson Rare Earth Pore Cleansing Masque now!

The cable network is developing the drama, which could serve as a starring vehicle for Dawson.

Voto Latino wants to get the word about how crucial it is for the Latin community to vote and they’ve got LOTS of artists to help them out!

The organization will offer a FREE 35 song compilation on iTunes to help encourage and inspire Latin voters. Pitbull has donated his song Something for the DJ‘s and other artists featured in the compilation include Miguel, Kat Deluna, Los Lobos, Los Tigres and Rodrigo y Gabriela.

It is muy importante for Latin Americans to vote and what’s better to get inspired by than free music?!?!

Rosario Dawson, co-founder of Voto Latino, says the following on Voto Latino:

Our interest is to keep bringing people into the political mix. Everyone should have an understanding of the system whether or not they’re eligible to vote and we believe that offering free music through social media platforms will help continue to motivate and engage those that may not already be a part of the conversation.

Vote, Vote, VOTE! The government needs to hear the Latino community’s voice!

Click HERE to get information about registering to vote and on how to obtain the free songs.

Originally Posted at PerezHilton.com

EA and Starbreeze Studios are enlisting high-profile actors for the voice cast of first-person shooter Syndicate. Rosario Dawson and Brian Cox will both play major characters in the game.

Dawson (Clerks II, Death Proof) will play Lily Drawl. Like the player, she’s an agent employed by the syndicate EuroCorp. However, she’s conflicted about her job and sympathizes with the underground resistance to the megacorporation’s reign.

“I’m amazed how videogames have become so deep in story, delivering fantastic worlds and memorable characters rivaling big Hollywood films,” said Dawson. “I was excited when EA approached me to play Lily Drawl in Syndicate. She’s an interesting and strong female character. How cool is it to play the mastermind who designed the military chip inside the player’s head!”

Cox, who appeared in X-2: X-Men United and The Bourne Supremacy among many others, portrays Jack Denham in the game. Denham is said to be the ruthless EuroCorp executive described as the “power behind the boardroom throne.” I’m gonna guess he’s a bad guy.
Michael Wincott (Alien: Resurrection,Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) was also confirmed for the voice cast. He plays a seasoned EuroCorp agent. Considering he mostly plays villains in films and video games (he was the Prophet of Truth in Halo 2), it’s safe to assume he’s not your BFF in this game.

“Syndicate immerses players deep into a dystopian world of unscrupulous corporations and chip augmented enforcers,” said Mikael Nermark, CEO of Starbreeze Studios. “These agents are the weapons of this war for market dominance and we needed strong talent to represent these intense characters. We are honored to have worked with the incredible Rosario Dawson, Brian Cox and Michael Wincott to make this world come alive.”

Check out the trailer for the game below, you can find it in stores now!

Rosario Dawson is not like other Hollywood actors. Consider this: she’s 32, and in her 20s decided she’d had enough of being judged on her looks, so took to wearing enormous sweatshirts to auditions.

“I’d perform my ass off, and the casting directors would be like, ‘You are perfect for this role, but can you wear something a little less shapeless?’” Her manager would bargain with her. She could wear a roll-neck jumper, he said – but could it at least be a fitted one? “I’m like, ‘Ugh, fine’, but these stupid conversations needed to be had, because unfortunately, don’t believe what they tell you, there’s very little imagination in Hollywood.” She hoots with laughter.

It annoyed her when casting directors asked to see her in more revealing clothes, she says, because she was naked in the film Alexander, “so go to any crazy, sick website and you’ll be able to look at it in slow motion if you like”. Does that bother her? “No, not at all, my point being: then don’t complain, ‘We don’t know what she really looks like.’ Are you kidding?! Do your research. ‘She looks a little fat right now’,” she says, recalling a message that filtered down from some rotten, deluded film executive. “Really? They’re called breasts … There was definitely a period for a couple of years where I rebelled against it. It probably cost me a lot of really big jobs, but I was just so angry.”

I had been worried Dawson would be too tired to talk properly. Earlier in the day, she had called to put the interview back two hours, pleading jetlag, her voice full of mid-Atlantic grogginess. But she arrives at the Guardian on foot, poses quickly for a photo, sits down and she’s away, words tumbling out.

She’s been a women’s activist for years, and I realise how steeped she is in feminist argument when she talks about how public-sector cuts are affecting women in the UK. (Dawson has a flat in London, but this still takes me aback.) She’s active in all sorts of ways – she’s a long-time volunteer with a girls’ club where she grew up in Manhattan, and appears in the feminist documentary Miss Representation. Later this month she’s performing in A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer, a benefit in London for the organisations V-Day and Women for Women International. The event is based on writings about violence against women, edited by playwright, activist and close friend, Eve Ensler.

The piece Dawson is performing is radical. Written by Periel Aschenbrand, In Memory of Imette starts with the narrator being terrified by the murder of a female student near her apartment. She arms herself with weapons including “a big-ass hunting knife,” Aschenbrand writes, “with which, if need be, I could slice off someone’s testicles”. I ask how Dawson feels about performing the monologue, and she says she completely agrees with its central message, that men and women need to talk more about rape. “You know, don’t just walk down the street and be like everything’s peaches and roses. It’s one in three women who are going to be raped, killed, beaten or abused in her lifetime, and that’s just real. To not live with that as a reality is really dangerous for women, and it lets a lot of guys off the hook from really paying attention to what’s happening to the women around them. Because it’s not all the men who are doing it, but not every single guy that boasts in the locker-room about the hot sex he had last night, had it with someone who was conscious.”

It’s not the first time Dawson has addressed the subject of rape head-on. She produced the 2007 film Descent, written and directed by her friend Talia Lugacy, and starred as Maya, a student who is raped by a classmate. The character goes on to exact revenge, in one of the more extreme scenes in modern, mainstream film-making, but the story is also thoughtful. It shows the slow arc of Maya’s brutalisation, and her feelings after striking back, too.

Being a producer on the film provided some useful distance, she says.

“Otherwise I could have disappeared into that character more, you know, and it would have taken me down. It was really depressing … But I thought it was important to show and really talk about revenge, and to put that question into people’s minds. People have all these ideas about it, but what it would actually look like is not a triumph. It’s actually really degrading and sad.” After the film came out, Ensler invited her to sit on the board of V-Day, a movement to end violence against women. “I remember exactly where I was when she asked,” she says, “and I was so excited.”

Dawson’s career has taken her through gritty dramas (He Got Game), broad teen comedies (Josie and the Pussycats), musicals (Rent), very broad adult comedies (Clerks II) and children’s films (Zookeeper). It includes the comic book fantasy, Sin City – a project that reflects her lifelong love of comics. (In 2006, she co-created her own comic series, Occult Crimes Taskforce.)

She started out playing Ruby in Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids, aged 15. Written by Harmony Korine, Kids is a tough, troubling film, opening with a scene of child sex and moving through drugs, theft, extreme violence, racism, rape and brutal conversations about men having sex with disabled women. In its midst, Dawson seemed one of the few mild beacons of hope. Her character was tough, too, laughing and joking about the difference between sex, making love and fucking (she preferred the last), but there was something essentially redemptive about her.

Although she’s very different to that character, she understood her circumstances, having grown up on New York’s Lower East Side herself.

Her mother was 17 when Dawson was born, and only found out she was pregnant when she was picked for the 1980 Olympic volleyball team and had to take a test. (The US Olympics team boycotted that year for political reasons, so it didn’t affect her participation.)

Dawson’s biological father was not around, but when her mother was eight months’ pregnant she started seeing a man she’d known for years, who went on to adopt her daughter. “I think about that now,” says Dawson, “such a young man, marrying a woman with a baby who’s not his – that just doesn’t happen. He just loved my Mom, and he loved me, and I loved my Dad, you know?”

She’s never met her biological father. “I tried looking him up online, and 70-something names showed up, some of them only with addresses, and I thought: I’m not going to do that … Maybe if I have a child, I’ll want to know, just for medical history reasons.” She was “violently afraid” of becoming a teenage mother herself, aware of how it had limited her mother’s options, but the experience of being adopted has made her keen to follow that lead – ideally to adopt an older child, who’s otherwise unlikely to find a home.

When she was growing up, Dawson’s father worked in construction, and her mother did a variety of jobs – electrician, plumber, typist – but the family faced financial straits. They lived, initially, “in this slumlord apartment, with rats, tilted floors, a bath tub in the kitchen”. There was a farmers’ market nearby and her mother “used to get food out of the bins. It was fresh food, but technically speaking, she was bin-diving. We still ate and we were eating organic,” she gives a wry smile. “But that’s a pretty tough thing as a Mom to have to do.”

They moved into a squat when she was six and her brother Clay was one. “A place with a huge, gaping hole in the ground and plastic for windows. I saw the stress on my parents. We were the only children in the building for years, because no one else was that crazy. But we had a wonderful childhood because of it. Everybody who moved in had different apartments, and it wasn’t until the sewage lines and the electricity went in that everybody disappeared behind their doors. People really needed each other beforehand.”

Her mother was always an activist; when Dawson was 10, her mother volunteered at a crisis centre where women who had been “beaten and abused, probably for years, showed up with children and the T-shirt on their back”. She would help her mother atHousing Works, an organisation providing housing for families and homeless people living with HIV/AIDS. “One person had been living like a hermit and didn’t have any family, any friends, and died. So here we were cleaning it out, and trying to make it nice and new again, so we could bring in someone else. It was heavy work.”

Her parents and other squat residents built a stoop to keep away drug dealers, and it was hanging out there one day that she was discovered by Clark and Korine. “This guy was like, ‘You just look so perfect.’ And I thought, ‘what are you talking about?’ Harmony was hopping up and down, he was 19, and Larry can come off a little lasciviously, so I was like, ‘Um, Daddy, there are random people here who have asked me to be in a movie.’”

Her father rode her to the audition on the crossbar of his bicycle. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this looks legitimate.’ It was a big office. I had to read, and Larry said, ‘Is that your boyfriend outside?’ And I was like, ‘Ew, that’s my Dad! What is wrong with you?’”

The family went on holiday to Texas with the money she made, and ended up living there. Dawson wasn’t completely sold on acting then. She’d always loved maths, and started to love biology. But she ended up moving back to Manhattan, and attending the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Dawson has a mixed heritage – Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Irish and Native American – and says this has been an unexpected asset. “I remember having a conversation with an actress who was blonde and blue-eyed, and she was like, ‘You’re going to do really well here [Hollywood].’ And I was still really struggling, and said, ‘O-K.’ And she said, ‘no, Rosario, there are a million girls who show up in Hollywood every day who look like me. There’s not a lot of people who look like you.”

Spending time with Dawson is uplifting. Her political discussion flows from Voto Latino, the organisation she co-founded in 2004 to encourage Latino people to vote; her passionate support for One Billion Rising, Ensler’s upcoming march to end violence against women; ecological campaigns; a call for an end to lobbying in Washington. She has been shooting Trance, an art-heist film directed by Danny Boyle, and is rapturously excited to be playing US labour rights activist, Dolores Huerta, in a film directed by Diego Luna.

And she talks with just as much effusive energy about the women’s benefit. “I love this piece,” she says, “because it’s really in your face, and sometimes you’ve got to make people a little uncomfortable.

“There are horror movies that are made, but those are fake horrors – there are plenty of real things to be scared about, and to want to do something about. I’m just grateful,” she says, like a true comic-book enthusiast, “to be able to use my powers for good, not evil”.

Rosario Dawson performs A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer at the Lyric Theatre, London, on 26 March 2012. All proceeds go to V-Day and Women for Women International. Details: nimaxtheatres.com or 0844 482 9674.

Source: The Guardian

Award-winning actress, writer and philanthropist Rosario Dawson will serve as spokesperson for the 5th Annual National Train Day and share her love of train travel and how it allows her to be involved in the community in a more personal way with rail fans. A celebration of train travel and the ways that trains touch the lives of people across America, National Train Day will take place in Dawson‟s native New York City, at train stations in Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles, and in communities nationwide, on Saturday, May 12, 2012. This year‟s festivities will highlight the unique perspective passengers enjoy as they take in the beauty and vastness of the American landscape from the comfort of their seats when traveling by rail.

“I am delighted to join Amtrak and train fans everywhere in celebrating National Train Day. I love trains not only because they offer a more intimate way to see the country and experience the communities along the way, but also because they are one of the greenest ways to
travel, which is a value that has always been important to me,” says Rosario Dawson. “So many of my very first memories of travel as a kid in New York City were on the train,” adds Dawson. “I remember riding on Amtrak and jumping up at the first opportunity to visit the café car. It’s great to be able to walk around, hang out and grab a bite at my leisure. I’m always watching the fast changing scenery through the windows which can be as mesmerizing as a film. It always makes the trip so much more vivid.”

“We are thrilled to have Rosario Dawson, someone who is an inspiration both on and off the screen, as our spokesperson for the 5th Annual National Train Day,” says Emmett Fremaux, Amtrak Vice President, Marketing and Product Development. “Like many of our customers, she is passionate about staying connected to her community and is someone who enjoys the journey, not just the destination.”

A multi-faceted talent, Dawson is known to her legions of fans for her work in film, her leading roles with today‟s hottest actors and directors, as well as her efforts as a philanthropist in communities across the country. When not starring opposite the likes of Will Smith in Men In Black II and Seven Pounds, Denzel Washington in Unstoppable, and Edward Norton in 25th Hour, Dawson is supporting a variety of community organizations. She is the co-founder of Voto Latino, the country’s leading non-partisan organization dedicated to bringing new and diverse voices into the political process to promote positive change, and is an active board member of VDay, a global organization founded by Eve Ensler committed to ending violence against women and girls. An ardent environmentalist, Dawson works with the Environmental Media Association to promote healthy, sustainable lifestyles and inspire environmentally responsible behavior, and serves as a mentor through its School Garden Program which provides interdisciplinary and student-centered experiences to enrich learning through “living classrooms.” Dawson also lends her time and efforts to the Lower Eastside Girls Club in Manhattan, a group devoted to helping girls grow, learn, have fun, and develop confidence in themselves and their ability to make a difference in the world.

National Train Day will bring the “rail way” to life for attendees, and those participating online and through social media. To join in the celebration, passengers inspired by their train travel experience are encouraged to submit photos, video and stories at NationalTrainDay.com, facebook.com/NationalTrainDay or @natltrainday for a chance to win prizes.

The “Be Counted, Represent” campaign offers music downloads and a chance at concert tickets to cell phone users who share their e-mail addresses and phone numbers with organizers and forward information about the census to their friends.

Principal organizers Voto Latino and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund stress in their messages that undercounted areas risk losing funding for transit, infrastructure and other needs, as well as political representation.

They hope those messages promoting participation in the count will zip throughout the social networks of youngsters who can persuade their parents to fill out and return their census forms.

“You’re looked at by many, many, many people as being powerful when it comes to money that they can line their pockets with,” actress Rosario Dawson, a Voto Latino co-founder, told teenagers gathered in the library of a predominantly Latino high school. “When it’s money that can line your pockets, no one ever says anything. But we’re saying something.”

The campaign offers a package of 25 music downloads curated for a young Hispanic audience to cell phone users who share their zip codes, e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers with the program’s organizers. The downloads include songs by such artists as Pitbull, Mos Def and Morrissey.

Users can get also get songs by taking census quizzes on a smart phone application that they download.

If they invite their friends to download the application, they’re entered into a raffle for tickets to a “secret concert” to be held in the Los Angeles area in April.

Anyone can participate, although the campaign is aimed at teens and 20-somethings.

Organizers said such measures are a way to get through to an ethnic group that has been hard for census officials to reach because of indifference, language barriers and — for some — deportation fears.

Alejandro Fernandez, an 18-year-old high school senior who attended the announcement, said he planned to download the census application on his Web-enabled phone and would share it with friends who will spread the word to their parents.

“They’ll be exposed to what the census is really about and not be scared,” he said.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The contest is being run by Obama’s political arm – Organizing for America – which is housed at DNC headquarters in Washington, DC. It is the latest effort by the president’s political team to try and enlist the grassroots to help pressure Congress to pass health care reform this year.

“We know that compelling videos can touch people in a way that words alone simply cannot,” Natalie Foster, OFA’s new media director, said in an e-mail announcing the contest last week. “The messages that regular people put together will make a bigger difference than any false smears or slick ads the other side can dream up. And who knows — your creative, powerful, or touching video could help tip the balance in favor of health reform.”

OFA will officially announce the names of the judges late Wednesday morning. The contest ends October 18

She didn’t elaborate on how the administration was “friendly,” but we presume she meant his work that supports the speech she gave about preventing sexual violence against women. She received a standing ovation.

Wearing a sleek, copper Bottega Veneta dress, Dawson appeared on behalf of the originally scheduled speaker, Eve Ensler — playwright of the “Vagina Monologues” and friend of Dawson (Dawson read for Ensler’s play last month in Santa Monica, Calif.).

Source: Washington Examiner